The Arabesk Trilogy Omnibus (70 page)

Top Industrialist Charged with Genocide…

He should have warned her. Before the American papers and the downloads and rolling newsfeeds began, before Trustafarian Ishies with their headsets and cameras started churning the lawns to mud. She could almost feel the hunger out there, calling its questions and tapping at windows, hammering on the big brass knocker and ringing the bell. News was a commodity to the
soi-disant
Free World, not a duty. And the bear-pit growl of its news gatherers could be heard through the study’s double glazing, through windows closed and locked, curtains drawn and shutters bolted.

“Dad, come on…” Dropping to a crouch in front of his chair, Zara rested her forearms on his knees and felt her father flinch. That was all it took to turn anger to tears. Zara began crying then, sorrow rolling down her cheeks. Somewhere she had a tissue, but couldn’t remember which pocket, and it didn’t seem to matter.

They cried in silence together.

She’d taken to asking herself a question a few years back. What was the worst it could be, the secret of her father’s rise from nothing? She’d searched for clues to the answer. Once, aged fifteen, she’d riffled through his desk, using a key taken from his jacket. All she’d found was a small leather case containing pornographic photographs of a young man and two girls even younger… Apart from a wood-handled knife, a handful of Sudanese coins and a bone crucifix, that had been the sum total of her find.

She hadn’t been able to look him in the face for weeks afterwards.

The worst she could say, until recently, was that he kept Western erotica in a drawer in his study. Now he was less than that, a man diminished. Zara was rapidly coming to realize that, just maybe, she’d never actually known who he was, not really. Her father, the industrialist Hamzah Effendi.

He broke the law for a living, she accepted that. Only he broke it less than he used to do and nothing like as much as when he was young. And anyway the free market was a crime in itself. As a good Marxist she did believe that. Of course, he also killed, or had done, at least once…

When she was nine she had overheard two servants discussing this and been proud. The dead man had been bad, obviously. Someone who attacked her father, forcing him to defend himself. It was all so clear in Zara’s head. Only when she tried asking her ma about it she’d been slapped for her pains. By the next morning both her nanny and the maid were gone.

Now nothing she could say to her father would change what was about to happen. PaxForce wanted him to stand trial and, according to the
New York Times,
Iskandryia’s new governor had agreed to hand over Hamzah, subject to agreeing upon a timetable.

What more was there to say?

Plenty
. And such was the shallowness of the Western press that
how
it was said would be as important as
what
was said. Picking up his revolver, weirdshit etching and whisky bottle, Zara slammed Hamzah’s study door behind her and went to get changed. Already she was rewriting elements of her plan.

“Zara…” The voice that met her on the landing was angry and bitter, but then it would be, it belonged to her mother.

“What?” Zara demanded.

It had been a joke among Zara’s friends that they could hear Madame Rahina long before they could see her, such was the clatter of gold from her wrists. Noisy bangles and an almost permanent scowl were Zara’s memories of her mother. Sometimes the gold had been so loud Zara hadn’t been able to hear the slap that followed.

“How could he…?”

“I thought you knew everything there was to know about him,” Zara said, her voice contemptuous. “Wasn’t that what you told everyone? Soul mates. Apart from his endless mistresses, your tranquillizers and the whisky…”

“Zara…”

Zara covered the outraged face with the spread fingers of one hand and pushed. Which was all it took to throw the woman backward. Zara didn’t bother to check how she landed.

Some of the men even had little ladders so they could peer over the heads of other photographers in front. Many wore pale safari suits of the kind carried at airports by ignorant
nasrani
journalists, who expected to land somewhere blisteringly hot. Only now their suits were dark with rain and hung with all the elegance of rags on a line.

“Miss Zara…”

She turned, saw Alex and sighed. The huge Soviet bodyguard stood like a scolded child, head down and fists clenched so hard that veins made freeways along his wrists. An hour earlier, while her father was still drinking himself into a stupor, Alex had been faced with a highly tenacious member of the press, who took bolt cutters to the gates and challenged Alex to shoot him. Without orders, Alex had retreated.

“You took the correct action,” Zara said, for about the third time.

Alex looked doubtful.

“Examine the options,” she said. “You think you should have shot him?” He did too, Zara could see it in his broad face. “Sometimes retreat is necessary,” Zara told Alex carefully. “But now someone must guard the front door. And that must be you.”

Zara watched the cogs whir as Alex glanced from her to the heavy wooden door, then back again. He was nice in his way, but monolithically slow. Still, each according to his talents…

“The door, right.” He nodded agreement and turned away, shoulders straightening.

“Comrade…”

“Yes, Miss Zara…?” He paused, shoulders broad, back straight, a Makarov 9mm bulging under one arm.

She smiled. “Nothing.”

Nothing will come of nothing,
that was a line from a play she was in, back when she went to college in New York… A city of high-rise boxes where the girls around her fucked anything with a pulse and a penis and quality control seemed to be a contradiction in terms. But something always did come from nothing. The universe, for a start. Time itself. All that other shit Raf talked about that one night on the boat, stuff she didn’t understand and guessed he didn’t either, not really…

Zara sighed and went back to working on her plan.

The bell was made from beaten silver and had an ivory handle. Its clapper was a narrow twist of iron that ended with a small ball of soft metal the size of a pea. For as long as Zara could remember, the bell had been used by her mother to summon the nearest maid. Her father thought the bell unnecessary, he just shouted.

“Come on.” Zara rang the bell until the first maid appeared, then kept going until she had every member of staff mustered in the hall. There were seven in total. Five housemaids, a French chef and a Sudanese gardener. A surprisingly small number for a house the size of Villa Hamzah.

“I want coffee,” she told the chef. “A large pot.”

“Of course, Miss Zara.” The little man nodded. “I’ll have Maryam bring it to the back drawing room.”

“No,” said Zara. “You’re missing the point. I want a
lot
of coffee.”

The chef blinked. “How much?” he asked, his voice neutral.

“Jugs of the stuff. Enough for two hundred people. And
semit
…” Zara named the soft sesame-covered pretzels sold everywhere in the city. “Can we do that?”

“Of course I can.”

Zara smiled. The Parisian would be baking all afternoon, mixing dough and waiting anxiously for his yeast to rise. “Make the coffee first,” she suggested. “I’ll take it outside myself.”

That got their attention.

“Ridiculous,” said the chef. “It’ll be far too heavy. Maryam and Lisa can carry it.”

“All right,” said Zara. “We also need as many umbrellas as you can find… Start with my mother’s dressing room,” she suggested, remembering a line of them hanging in a row along the back of a cupboard.

“Oh…and Alex.” She left out her usual
comrade,
not wanting to embarrass the big Russian in front of the others. “Order me a marquee. Something vast, but without sides… We don’t want to overdo it.”

CHAPTER 37

23rd October

The air was warm, the afternoon sun a haze of ultraviolet
through cloud. The heavy rain didn’t bother him. Not like back in Seattle.

“Ashraf Bey…”

Raf kept going, while behind him Hakim took it upon himself to punch the photographer to the ground. Providing the world with another picture.

The new governor’s face already fronted
Time, Paris Match
and
Newsweek
. Cheeks hollow, eyes hard behind dark glasses, hair swept back. It was a face that Raf didn’t recognize, even when he stared hard in the mirror.

As to why a mere handful of journalists clustered around the mansion in Shallalat Gardens… That was easy to answer. The rest were camped out on the lawns at Villa Hamzah, from where talking heads currently reported seriously on nothing very much.

Zara’s offer of coffee and
semit
had been a flash of brilliance, but ordering a marquee and then staying outside to watch while a hundred journalists struggled with poles and wet ropes was beyond genius. And as they struggled, Zara had watched, not offering to help or saying anything, just standing on the lawn of Villa Hamzah, while photographers captured her guarded amusement at the chaos.

When the marquee was finally up and the journalists were out of the rain, Zara had walked into the middle of their group, without a bodyguard, without having to ask anyone to move out of her way. And then she stopped, watching them as they watched her. Meeting their lenses and the bursts of flash without blinking or looking away…

“Where to, Boss?”

Raf came awake in the back of his Bentley.

“Villa Hamzah.” Same as it ever was.

Then Zara had spun in a slow circle, meeting their eyes, one person at a time. At least that’s what they thought; but really she’d been looking for a single logo among dozens.

Raf knew that now without doubt.

The journalists might have thought Zara was there to talk to them, only they were wrong. She’d stopped turning, stopped smiling the moment she saw someone from a local newsfeed. After that, her words had been for Raf alone.

“I am waiting to hear back from the governor. I’m sorry, but until then there is nothing more I can say…”

So now the governor was on his way, through a city that flickered by like the backdrop to some film he vaguely remembered preferring the first time round. The statue of Mehmet V, which once seemed so impressive, now looked tatty and grandiose, more parks than ever looked empty, windows to shops were unlit or shuttered tight with steel grilles: the rococo mansions of the Corniche that once seemed so magnificent behind their wrought-iron gates now looked defeated, held prisoner by their own defences.

We define ourselves by our own limitations.
The fox had said that to him once, in Seattle, shortly before it pointed out that on this basis Raf should be very defined indeed.

But am I?
Raf wanted to ask, only the voice in his head refused to answer and the voice in his heart that Khartoum talked about was missing, absent without leave. So maybe he was just the sum of his parts, few though those were. A face that looked like someone else, a fake identity and a job he hadn’t asked for…

“Ahmed, do you know who you are?”

The bigger of his two gun-toting bodyguards turned his head, while the driver and Hakim kept staring straight on: watching the Corniche unravel through the car’s ancient windscreen. “Do I what, Boss?”

“You know who you are?”

Ahmed nodded.

“You ever think you might be somebody else…?”

Raf saw the answer written in the other man’s puzzled frown. “Doesn’t matter,” he said flatly. “Just forget it.”

There was silence in the Bentley after that as the driver concentrated on the road and Hakim and Ahmed eyeballed the sidewalk and beach respectively, their fingers never leaving the triggers of their H&K5s.

“Your Excellency…” It was the driver. “Five and counting.”

Koenig Pasha was the one who’d originally demanded five minutes advance warning of when he was due to arrive. And there was a hierarchy of address too. Apparently Ahmed and Hakim got to call him Boss, while the driver was required to be more formal. It was a city of rules, from opaque to transparent. Every city was.

Opening his eyes, Raf sat up and watched the coast become familiar. That café, a swimming hut on stilts, then the beach where…a galaxy of stars had skimmed across bare shoulders to be swallowed into darkness between perfect breasts. The hunger brought on by the memory corroded what was left of his pride.

He was no use to Zara as he was, that much Raf understood. No use to anyone; not even himself. Certainly not to the city or to Hani, which was what he mostly cared about these days.

And that meant it was time to change.

“We’re here, Boss.”

They were too, passing through heavy wrought-iron gates that had been yanked open and pushed back. Lawns that had been immaculate the last time Raf saw them were crude scars of dark earth, trampled to mud by the same journalists who now rushed the huge Bentley. Already photographers were scuffling for the best shot as a ’copter overhead suddenly dropped height, its specially adapted gun pod swinging a long lens in Raf’s direction.

“Take it down,” Raf ordered.

Ahmed looked doubtful but wound down his side window and started to unsling his machine gun all at the same time. Instantly the camera crews moved closer, unleashing a firestorm of flashguns and shouted questions.

“Not like that,” Raf said as he slapped down the gun. “Get on the wire and ground that piece of shit.”

“Sure thing,” said Ahmed, tapping his throat mike. “What do I tell them, Boss?”

“Tell them that, as of now, airspace over El Iskandryia is a no-fly zone. No overflights, nothing. Tell the pilot if he’s not landed in one minute we’ll blast him out of the sky. Final warning.”

“No overflights… What about the airport?”

“Close it.”

The flash and arc lights didn’t bother Raf, he just recalibrated his vision and kept walking towards the blank-eyed cameras.
Reptiles
was what the General called Ishies, that and other things. Watching them watch him reminded Raf of his mother’s early films; not the cuddly shit she shot for money, the tooth-and-claw stuff that made her name. He couldn’t remember their titles now, but all those films had blood in them. Red blood on white snow. Zhivago shots, she called them, she was big on those.